


Five Times Natasha Romanov Let People Into Her Heart, Plus One They Did The Same

by IAmSorry__sendmeaprompt



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Avengers Family, Avengers Tower, Awesome Natasha Romanov, Childhood Trauma, Clint Barton & Natasha Romanov Friendship, Developing Friendships, Domestic Avengers, F/M, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Natasha Romanov Feels, Natasha Romanov Is a Good Bro, Natasha Romanov Joins SHIELD, Prank Wars, Protective Natasha Romanov, Recovery, Red Room (Marvel), Super Soldier Natasha Romanov, Super Soldier Serum (Marvel), Trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-03
Updated: 2021-03-11
Packaged: 2021-03-15 01:42:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 12,297
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29181222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IAmSorry__sendmeaprompt/pseuds/IAmSorry__sendmeaprompt
Summary: When Natasha Romanov is captured, she has to adjust to a whole new environment.She recovers from her early life, and forges new friendships with her new team.
Relationships: Clint Barton/Laura Barton, James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers, Pepper Potts/Tony Stark
Comments: 14
Kudos: 35





	1. Clint Barton

**Author's Note:**

> Natasha Romanov deserves the world, fight me, thank you

Waking up quickly and bolting upright, Natasha immediately didn’t understand why she wasn’t dead.

Looking around the small, sterile, white room she was being stored in, her eyes landed on the tray holding beef stew sitting on the little table beside her bed. And she  _ was _ in a bed. A borderline comfortable one. She was wearing a papery hospital gown. She took stock of her body, cataloguing every bright spot of pain she felt.

Huh.

She was bruised and scratched up to hell and back, but didn’t have any major injuries. Despite the hospital gown and vaguely medical look of the room, she hadn’t been operated on. Hadn’t been experimented on again, unless it was something that didn’t leave any marks. Briefly, she wondered if they’d been screwing around in her brain again, but she didn’t have the sour, fuzzy feeling that that always left her with.

So. She wasn’t dead, and she wasn’t in a jail cell. Where the hell was she? The room didn’t look like any part of the Red Room she’d ever been in, plus it was too comfortable. She wasn’t in the Red Room.

The last thing she remembered was being on a stakeout. She’d been given her orders, told which target to eliminate, and she’d gone to do it like a good little weapon. She closed her eyes briefly, trying to remember what had happened.

It had been hot. She’d felt like she was baking under the unforgiving rays of the sun, but she’d known better than to act like it. She’d been trained for worse.

There had been a lot of people around, it had been hard to get a bead on her target. She had been frustrated, because the mission had already taken too long. She’d be punished for that when her handlers picked her up.

She remembered the soft swish of air moving past her ear, looking back to find an arrow embedded in the wall. 

After that, her memory was kind of fuzzy. She focused, hard, and came up with a jumble of  _ who the hell uses arrows these days,  _ a flash of a man with sandy hair sprinting toward her  _ who was he, what had he done, _ the feeling of someone’s neck between her thighs as she sprung, lithe and quick,  _ just a twist and he’d be dead, he’s probably dead,  _ the feeling of a sharp prick of pain on her leg, her sight going fuzzy, _ he drugged me? How did he do that, that shouldn’t work, _ and then… nothing.

The sandy-haired man had obviously captured her. Who was he?

She looked down at the palms of her hands, blue veins standing out against thin but strong wrists. There were no cuffs, no chains.

She got up, wincing at the stiffness in her muscles, and went over to the door. It was, of course, locked. Sighing, she decided she may as well sit and wait. Maybe eat some of the stew. If it was spiked with something, the bastardized, old-school-KGB super serum running through her veins would keep her alive.

Or would it? After all, the man’s sedative had taken her out, and that shouldn’t have happened. Oh well, she thought, doesn’t matter either way.

***

Some indeterminate number of hours later, the door opened to reveal a tall black man in a long coat with an eye patch. Natasha looked up at him slowly from where she was coiled on the bed. She tried to exude intimidation and power, despite her somewhat precarious position.

The man looked at her.

She looked back.

“Black Widow,” he said.

She inclined her head ever so slightly.

“I’m going to need you to tell me everything you know about the Red Room and the people who used it.”

She smiled just enough to show sharp canines, a smile with no warmth. “Who are you?” She didn’t expect an answer.

The man surprised her, although she tried not to show it, when he answered, “Nick Fury. Director of the Strategic Homeland Intervention Enforcement and Logistics Division.”

She blinked. She’d never heard of that. But then, she hadn’t been an intelligence officer. She’d just taken her orders.

“You’re safe here, Widow. You have information that we need. One of our agents brought you in.” Fury moved into the room, revealing a man behind him. The other man gave her a bland smile and continued filling out information on the clipboard he held.

“The man,” she said. “With the arrows.”

Fury nodded. “Please, Widow. Help us and we can help you.”

***

It took Natasha three days to decide to help them. In that time period, she was given three meals a day. She was poked and prodded by scientists and doctors, of course, but to her surprise none of them hurt her. She wasn’t punished for failing in her mission, so they obviously weren’t affiliated with the Red Room. She also wasn’t tortured for information.

The agent who’d captured her came to visit. He introduced himself as Clint, and Natasha noticed that he had the remnant of a black eye. He was kind to her, kind enough that she mustered up some remorse that had apparently never quite been trained out of her.

She was expecting him to be angry, to hurt her. She was, after all, an enemy assassin who’d hurt him. Instead, he brought her a book of crossword puzzles.

It was that, more than anything, that led Natasha to talk to Fury.

And that was how she found herself in a hard, metal chair, with cuffs around her wrists for the first time, talking into a recorder as Fury and the agent who did a lot of paperwork sat across from her.

“I was three years old when the Red Room took me, in 1928. I remember, my mother’s name was Anastasia…”

“... there were twenty-eight of us. The training regimens they put us through were brutal. We had to…”

…”They would implant false memories, make us more pliable, make us into perfect sleeper agents…”

“The drugs they gave us, they gave us such a long lifespan. Made us harder to kill, made us superhuman, almost…”

“...they wanted to break us. They would clone us, sometimes, have us kill the clones. When you have to kill someone that looks like the girl you thought was your friend so many times, you don’t think to make alliances with her anymore…”

“They wanted offspring from us they could train, but the drugs had made us sterile…”

“...they’re dead now, the other twenty-seven girls. They made mistakes…”

When she reached the end of her tale, having told them everything she knew about the Red Room, who was giving her her orders, and every detail she could recall on how the Russian organization worked, she leaned back in her chair, folded her hands, and waited for the questions.

Fury didn’t disappoint. “Were you programmed to act in certain ways when certain triggers came into play?”

“No. The false memories and loyalty they implanted were enough to keep us in line.”

“You say ‘they’ trained you. Who is they?”

“The training was so many years ago, I am sure they are all dead by now. Now there’s just nameless scientists ensuring continued cooperation, and military men spitting orders.” She paused, considered. “Well, they’re all dead except, possibly, one.”

Fury leaned forward, nearly imperceptibly.

Natasha smiled, a genuine smile this time. “They called him the Winter Soldier.”

***

Natasha spent the next six months after that conversation at SHIELD. She was extensively and exhaustively examined, until it was determined that there were no more minefields planted in her brain, she wasn’t going to snap and murder everyone if she heard the wrong word.

She had no illusions about her freedom; it was nonexistent. She also didn’t know who she could trust, so she spent quite a bit of time in a skittish, terrified state.

The longer she spent away from the regimen of the Red Room, the more she discovered things about herself as a person. She could think, and reason, and make decisions for herself again. It was terrifying, it took so much adjusting.

The psychologist SHIELD had her see was very helpful. Over the months, they systematically worked out all the programming Natasha had undergone, gathered together the shattered pieces of her psyche and put her back together as her own person.

Natasha spent a lot of time in those six months with Clint Barton, the agent who’d brought her in. He was unfailingly kind to her, and she loved him for it. She tried in her own way to be kind to him, to return his faith in her with some kind of recognition. At first it was as though all the ability to be amiable had been burnt out of her permanently, leaving behind jagged scars of indifference and unease, but as time went on, it grew easier.

With Clint, she discovered that she loved caramel in her coffee, but hated the cloying taste of mocha.

Clint took her up onto the roof of the building at night and they sat together, watching the blinking lights of the city so far beneath them in comfortable silence.

Clint sparred with her, when she was cleared to do so, keeping up a running commentary of lighthearted jabs and jokes. Natasha tried her best to reciprocate in kind, and was pleasantly surprised when the workouts turned out to be fun instead of the painful tests of endurance they’d always been before.

They watched movies together, and she sat with him and chatted inanely when he was forced by Agent Coulson to fill out paperwork. One day, when he’d just come back from a mission where he was undercover in a circus, he’d curled up on the bench next to her, plopped his head in her lap, still in clothes torn and dirty from his ordeal, and told her in halting words how being back there brought back childhood memories that he really preferred to be repressed.

She’d listened to his story, well aware that he was trusting her with everything she’d need to throw words at him like knives, to hurt him so completely he’d never forgive her. 

She knew she’d never do that, she thought, as she felt a rush of sadness for the lost little boy Clint had been, so when he choked out the last few words, she’d just reached down and soothingly stroked his hair, humming an old Russian lullaby she only half remembered the tune to.

They sat like that for hours, Clint’s soft sobs mingling with her humming. She kept up the stroking his hair, sometimes lightly scritching his scalp with her fingernails. Gradually, his sobs died off and he relaxed into the touch.

The next day, Natasha asked Clint to teach her sign language so she could talk to him without his aids in. She’d had a brief moment of panic that she’d done something wrong when his eyes went glassy with tears and his voice cracked as he gave his answer, but his words soon alleviated that. “I- Laura is the only other person who’s ever cared enough to ask me that,” he’d explained, haltingly. She’d covered his trembling hands with her own, then pulled him into a hug. After that, she threw herself into learning sign language with a determination she’d previously only used on training skills.

Sometimes, Natasha had bad days. There were times when the memories of the things she’d done and that had been done to her rose up in her mind even as bile rose up in her throat. Some days, she’d feel like she was suffocating on the echoes of pain she felt, when all she could see when she looked at herself was cold, calculating eyes and hands dripping red with blood.

On those days, she went down to the SHIELD gym and took her frustrations out on a punching bag for hours on end. 

Clint found her down there, on a day when the memories and nightmares had been particularly bad. All her coordination and poise had disappeared; she was striking wildly at the bag, picturing the faces of her tormentors, as tears welled up in her eyes.

He’d caught both her wrists in his hands, hauling her away from the bag. She’d screamed and flailed, but compared to him she was tiny, and in her current state she couldn’t get away from him. He’d sat her down gently on the floor, talked to her soothingly as he cleaned and bandaged the knuckles she hadn’t even noticed had been busted open. She looked over at the bag. It was smeared with blood.

Probably a good thing he’d pulled her away when he did, or she might’ve done some real damage to herself.

But with the lack of action came the memories again, rising up and threatening to swallow her whole, and she turned her face into Clint’s chest and cried. Between hitching breaths, the worst things she’d ever done, her greatest regrets, came spilling out.

In the deathly silence that followed, she waited for Clint to pull away, anticipating the pain that would come when he realized she was too broken to be useful to SHIELD, that she needed to be put down.

Instead, he pulled her closer, pressed a soft kiss to each of her bandaged knuckles like a parent reassuring an injured child, then sat with her on the floor in the gym, softly rubbing her back as she huddled close to his solid, comforting warmth.

***

A year after Natasha was brought in to SHIELD and underwent her subsequent deprogramming, counseling, and general life overhaul, she was cleared to begin training as an agent of SHIELD, if she so wished.

She did, indeed, so wish.

***

After that, when she’d been an agent for some number of years, Nick Fury called her into his office and handed her a file folder. “The Avengers Initiative,” he said. “You’re in. Here’s the information on your new teammates.”


	2. Tony Stark

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Natasha meets the man hidden behind Tony's walls

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is probably not coherent and I am sorry for that

When the billionaire in the flashy red and gold suit told her that there was a home waiting for her in the newly rebuilt Avengers Tower, Natasha had stared at him in disbelief over her bowl of ravioli. A home? Natasha couldn’t remember the last time she had a home. She’d always just sort of… existed places.

She’d infiltrated his company, she’d lied to him, she’d written a disparaging report about him, and he was still offering her a home.

Clint, of course, took Tony up on the offer immediately, and promptly began splitting his time between living in the Tower and going home to his wife and kids. When he heard that Natasha was still unsure about the change of location, he’d dragged her out to the old Barton farm with him, insisting that it would clear her head.

Natasha had walked in the door after him and stood awkwardly as a woman moved toward her and smiled warmly, pulling her into a hug. “Hello, dear. You must be Natasha. I’m Laura, and those two are Cooper and Lila.” She waved a hand toward two kids watching them from around a doorway. “This one,” she gestured at her stomach, “is currently unnamed.”

Natasha smiled and hugged Laura back.

She spent a couple of weeks there, playing with Cooper and Lila and getting to know Laura. 

She taught the kids words in Russian, and they taught her how to curse in sign. She allied with them to play pranks on Clint, who retaliated often and with great glee.

She sat with Laura in the evenings and talked, both of them sipping on tea made from herbs in Laura’s window box. Natasha discovered that she liked honey in her tea, while Laura preferred sugar cubes, and filed that information away with no small amount of glee. It was so  _ good _ to have preferences all of her own!

Every Saturday, Laura would bake bread. Natasha discovered that she loved the soothing, repetitive motion of the kneading, and shortly after that she found out that she also loved eating freshly baked bread.

This was what a home felt like. This was family.

Natasha had never had a family before.

When she returned to New York, she gathered her possessions together in the SHIELD dormitory, packed them neatly away in her bag, and set out for midtown Manhattan.

Avengers Tower was, in a word, intimidating. The chrome-and-glass lobby was full of very important looking people rushing around in suits. Natasha briefly remembered when she, as Natalie Rushman, had been one of them.

She hoped nobody recognized her, that would probably cause unnecessary trouble.

She marched over to the reception desk and gave her name. Her real one, this time. The icy blonde behind the desk tapped away on her computer for a minute, then glanced up at Natasha through wire-rimmed frames. “Mr. Stark will be down shortly,” she said coolly. “You may wait.”

The old Natasha would have said something cutting and quite possibly threatening, maybe pulling aside her jacket to show a hint of a weapon. The new Natasha politely thanked the receptionist and plopped down in a chair to wait.

She didn’t wait long. Four minutes later, Tony Stark himself popped out of an elevator across the lobby and rushed over to her.

As she was hurried into the elevator, Natasha reflected that Tony was quite a bit like a tornado. He whirled around all over the place, usually fuelled by caffeine and science, causing total uproar. To Natasha, who’d spent her entire life in the shadows, such a brash existence was quite nearly jarring to be in close contact with.

Tony babbled as they rode the elevator up, up, and up. “So I put you on the floor right below Barton’s, I figured you two would like to be pretty close together, if there’s anything that you don’t like or want changed then we can do that but I went with an open floor plan? Kinda thought, what with the whole traumatized rehabilitated spy thing, you wouldn’t want a whole bunch of hallways and corners and stuff.” He paused, looked at her. Natasha rather thought she probably looked a bit shellshocked.

She managed a weak nod, and Tony took that to mean he should keep talking. “JARVIS only lets Avengers and other qualified people into this elevator, so you don’t need to worry about that. If you have any questions, he’ll tell you where the pool and gym and stuff is. I gave you a shooting range but I didn’t stock it because I figured you’d probably want to pick your own weapons. Oh! Speaking of which, I’ve made a modified version of your widow’s bites, if you wanna stop by the lab sometime and check them out.”

Natasha found her voice. “I’d like that. Thank you.”

***

It took her a couple of days to adjust to Avengers Tower. JARVIS was a great help, as was Tony. Natasha had been thoroughly shocked to realize that she had an entire floor; surely Tony had gone a good bit overboard there?

She’d thanked him again, profusely, and been waved off with a reminder to stop by the lab later, and then the whirlwind of Tony was being shepherded away by a very professional and vaguely exhausted-looking Pepper Potts.

Natasha baked bread in her new kitchen, and took Tony a loaf when she went by the lab to test her new widow’s bites. Tony was sitting in a swivel chair with his back toward her, humming along to Metallica, and brandishing a blowtorch at a large hunk of metal.

A smooth British voice cut through the melee. “Sir, I believe you have a visitor.” Tony startled out of his chair, dropping the blowtorch in shock. Then he jumped back quickly, to avoid having his feet blowtorched off. He whirled around to face Natasha, who gave a small wave of the bread loaf.

“Hey! Hi! Yes! I’ve got your bites here and there’s a training dummy over by DUM-E if you wanna test them out.” The words tumbled hurriedly out of his mouth as he shoved the bracelets at her.

“There’s a dummy by the… dummy?” Natasha set the bread down and slipped the bracelets on.

“Oh, no. There’s a training dummy over by one of my bots, whose name is DUM-E. He’s the one in the dunce cap.” Tony picked up the blowtorch and started hitting the chunk of metal with it, grunting curses under his breath. Natasha wondered how long he’d been awake.

She meandered over to the robot in the dunce cap, who beeped mournfully at her and skittered in a circle. Feeling a little bit foolish, she held out her hand like she would for a dog, and was rewarded when the bot crept slowly closer to her. “Hello there,” she said softly, and he pressed his camera (head?) against her palm. Another bot, wearing a nametag reading “YOU”, came up behind her and nudged her arm. Natasha chuckled and petted him too.

After her impromptu robot bonding session, she headed for the training dummy to test out her new bites, and was thoroughly pleased with the outcome. The electricity was, according to JARVIS, stronger than ever, and Tony had somehow created a way for them to make her victims groggy and disoriented for quite some time after waking up - if they woke up. Natasha was thrilled.

She must have been learning the ins and outs of her new weapons for longer than she thought, because when she turned back toward Tony to thank him again, he was asleep slumped across his desk. “JARVIS? How long has he been down here?”

“Seventy-one hours,” came the answer. “May I suggest having the bots help you move him to his couch?”

The bots were somewhat difficult to corral, but once she got across that they needed to help carry Tony to the couch, they got the hang of it. SHe gently slid Tony out of his chair so his legs were resting across YOU’s back, then laced her fingers under his arms and struggled across the floor. Somehow, Tony remained fast asleep.

She and the bots got him settled on the couch, and Natasha pulled a grease-stained blanket over him. He looked so peaceful and innocent when he was asleep, she could almost forget the brash, hurtful man he really was. She knew that a lot of the reputation he had was caused by Obadiah Stane’s double-dealing, but still. This was a man called the Merchant of Death.

Well, she wasn’t one to judge. Back in the sixties, they’d called her Death’s Mistress.

She wondered if Tony had nightmares like she did, if he woke up screaming. He probably did. Maybe that was why he spent so much time in his lab, pushing himself to the breaking point to avoid sleep. He needed someone to understand; someone to be a supporting shoulder like Clint had been to her.

Natasha had never been comforting before, never had anyone to comfort, but she could figure it out. She’d talk to JARVIS later. Before leaving the lab, she put the bread somewhere he’d see it when he woke up, then reached out and brushed a lock of hair off of his forehead. He leaned into her touch and made a little mumbling noise.

She smiled and left the lab, secure in her new mission: be a friend to the man with impenetrable walls built around every facet of his being.

***

They fell into a routine.

Natasha went to coffee with Pepper, and they gossiped about Tony Management Strategies.

She spent hours talking to JARVIS and practicing her sign language skills.

They were called out to fight a giant mutant millipede wreaking havoc in Queens.

She talked to JARVIS about Tony, but the AI was tight-lipped. He told her what would help Tony, but he wouldn’t say what ahd hurt him. Natasha resolved to ask the man himself, but the time just never came.

Natasha still went on missions for SHIELD, but she spent some time at the Tower too.

A few weeks after moving in, she asked Tony if she could possibly teach a self-defense class for his employees. After all, working for a superhero was a dangerous job, and they could probably use the knowledge. If it never got used against a supervillain, well. They still lived in New York, and it would probably come in handy.

Tony, of course, fell all over himself to get word of the class spread, make sure there was enough space and supplies for everyone, and insisted on paying Natasha for her time.

Natasha was surprised but grateful for the support, and spent an hour each evening down in the gym, showing Stark employees how to break bones and escape choke holds.

***

One night, as she sat with her legs twisted up underneath herself in her kitchen, sipping on her tea with honey, she mused that for all the time she spent with Tony, trying to get to know him, she never really made it past his defenses. “JARVIS, where is he now?”

“Sir is in his lab. I believe he is quite intoxicated. Would you mind…?” He trailed off delicately, by which Natasha inferred that Tony wasn’t listening to him when the AI told him to stop working and get some rest.

“Of course,” and she made a mug of chamomile tea to take down with her. Luring a drunk genius out of his safe space was a daunting task. About three minutes later, she was standing in front of a dark wall of glass. “He initiated a blackout.”

“Yes. You do, however, have an override code.” Her phone pinged, and she input the code into Tony’s keypad. The glass cleared and the door swung open.

She didn’t see him, but she heard a low, keening wail, She stepped into the lab and was immediately accosted by DUM-E, beeping frantically and spinning his tire treads. She followed him through a maze of partially finished products, speeding up as the sound of crying grew louder.

Tony was under a desk, surrounded by bottles. YOU was sitting in front of him, making a low humming noise. Natasha moved closer. “Tony?”

At her voice, he scrambled back further under the desk. She crouched down to his level and kept her voice low, talking like she would to a frightened animal. “Tony, can you come out of there?”

“Cold,” he said, his teeth grinding audibly. “Cold and dark and gonna die.” His voice was slurred as he took a swig from the bottle he was holding. His hair stuck to his forehead, sweat soaking through his shirt. He was covered in grease, dirt, and was that blood?

“Tony, you’re bleeding. Can you come out and let me take a look?” She was officially worried now.

“Blood all over, everyone,” he singsonged, then let out a bitter laugh. “S’okay, Natalie, I s- sh- should bleed. Made everyone bleed.” But he uncurled himself and scooted out from under the desk. Natasha gently grabbed his hand and saw that there was shattered glass, probably from a bottle, stuck in his skin.

“Okay, Tony. Let’s get you upstairs.” As she manhandled him toward the elevator, he kept babbling. She caught fragments of words, which painted a very concerning picture.

“Killed so many…”

“...drowned so many times for Jericho…” What was Jericho? Who drowned Tony?

“...ripped me apart, my heart…” and he clawed at the arc reactor set into his chest until she feared that he’d tear it out.

“...so big’n’open’n’dark, can’t fly anymore…” 

JARVIS opened the elevator door to reveal Tony’s penthouse, then directed her to his bathroom. She staggered down the hall, his arm slung over her shoulders. When they reached the bathroom, she sat him down on the counter and methodically pulled the glass out of his hands. He stared at her as she worked, wild eyes darting around. “Gonna kill me now?”

That hurt more than she’d expected it to. “No, Tony. I’m not going to kill you. Come on, shower time.” And she helped him, fully clothed, under the warm spray. 

His visceral reaction startled her. He began screaming and thrashing, calling out for someone named Yinsen, begging her not to send him Bakaar. “Tony! Tony, it’s okay. You’re in your penthouse, in the shower, it’s all right. Tony, we’re in New York. Nobody is going to hurt you.” She turned the showerhead so it hit the wall instead of the man curled in the tub, and gradually Tony came back to himself.

“Gonna wash you off, okay?” He nodded and gritted his teeth as she did so, then helped him change into clean, dry clothes. She bandaged his cut-up hands and filled a glass of water for him. As she held it to his lips, one hand came clumsily up to rest on her cheek.

She froze, the roughness of the gauze bandage pressing into her skin. “Tony? Are you all right?”

He giggled. “Why’re you… still here? Coulda left me down there.” 

She held the water to his mouth and made him drink a few sips before she answered. “Because I consider you a friend, Tony, and I do not want to see you hurting.”

He shook his head, sending water droplets flying. “Nuh-uh. Iron Man yes, Tony not re- rec- recommended? You hate me.” He hung his head and glared at the innocent water glass. “Don’t blame you. So do I.”

Well. That was certainly something to deal with when he was sober. “Come on, Tony. Let’s get you into bed, you need sleep.”

***

She didn’t see him the next day, because he was too hungover to get out of bed, but over the next two or three weeks she did her best to show him that she really did want to be his friend. In return, he opened up to her, a little bit. He didn’t tell her anywhere near everything, but the few clipped sentences she did get explained that he’d been captured and tortured in Afghanistan, and he was still haunted by what he’d seen when he flew that missile into space.

She couldn’t heal him, she couldn’t take away his pain, but she could convince him that she didn’t hate him and that she was there for him. 

She spent time down in the lab when he was there, talking to him and listening to him talk about complicated things she didn’t quite understand.

She invited him up to her floor every Friday night, where they ate Chinese takeout and laughed at bad movies.

She dragged him out of the Tower to an exhibition at the Museum of Art, and they spent a fun Saturday afternoon scrutinizing modern art and wondering how, exactly, it  _ was  _ art.

As time went on, she wore down his walls and got to know the man behind them, and in return, she let her guard down around him.

When Clint came back to the Tower, she quickly enlisted Tony’s help in starting a prank war of epic proportions, one that was still raging when Dr. Bruce Banner, soon followed by the Norse god of thunder, moved in.


	3. Bruce and Thor

No fanfare accompanied Bruce’s moving into the Tower; indeed, Natasha only realized he was there when she went to the common room Tony had designed for Avengers use in search of the mechanic, and found instead one Bruce Banner, sitting calmly on a couch and reading a very large book.

“Hello,” Natasha said, cautiously. “Have you seen Tony? Or Clint, for that matter? I owe him for the glitter in my pillowcase.”

Bruce looked up at her and blinked in surprise. Slowly, he took off his glasses and folded them, then set his book aside to give her his full attention. “Black Widow.”

“Call me Natasha.”

He gave a small smile and ran his hands through his hair. “Natasha. Yes. Tony gave me the tour and then headed for Pepper’s office, something about a shared call with stockholders needing his attention. And I believe I heard maniacal laughter coming from the ventilation shaft earlier.”

Maniacal laughter certainly sounded like Clint. The bastard was probably planning something new.

Belatedly, Natasha realized that she probably had a very dark expression on her face as she contemplated revenge (there was glitter in her ears. Her EARS.), and that Bruce was looking more alarmed by the minute. Natasha supposed that her murder face was probably a bit intimidating, so she tried to smooth it out. Judging by the look on his face, it didn’t work.

“Right, I’m going to go find Tony. You let me know if you need anything,” she says, and whirls around to leave, head already swimming with thoughts of paintball guns and rubber arrows. Bruce is left staring bemusedly at her back, and a faint laugh filters out of the vents.

***

Bruce made curry that first night he spent in the Tower. Natasha knew this because he knocked on her door a little bit after six, holding a steaming bowl, and asked her if she wanted some.

On the one hand, he was a new person she didn’t know. She hadn’t had time to trust him yet. On the other hand, the curry smelled amazing.

Natasha let him in, internally feeling very proud of herself. Progress! She wasn’t automatically shutting everyone out anymore!

Bruce was standing awkwardly in her entryway, a dash of what was probably cayenne pepper smeared across his nose, looking around in confusion. She gently directed him to the kitchen, and five minutes later, they were sitting across from each other at her little table, sharing awkward smiles and snippets of conversation between bites of the curry.

The curry was very hot; Natasha went through three glasses of water. Bruce chuckled a little bit and kept eating, like he didn’t even feel the heat. Privately, Natasha wondered if the Hulk part of him made him more immune to spices.

When Bruce stood to go, bearing his mostly empty curry pan, he reached across the table and gently clasped Natasha’s shoulder. “Thank you,” he said.

“For what? You brought the food.”

“For not being afraid of me. I’d like to be friends, if that’s all right?” And he was peering at her so hopefully from behind those glasses, and looking so ordinary and human and completely trustworthy, so much unlike the monster that Fury had sent her into battle against years before, that she couldn’t help but say yes.

***

The next day, Natasha went down to teach her self-defense class and discovered that her gym (and most of her class) was thoroughly occupied with a blond Norse god. Natasha stood in the doorway, pointedly not smiling, as various people in her class tried to lift Mjolnir at Thor’s urging. Of course, he saw her, and waved her over, booming out “Widow! Come join us!”

Natasha shakes her head.

“Would you care to attempt to lift my hammer?”

Oh, he has got to be joking. She knows he knows who she is and what he’s done. Is he trying to humiliate her in front of her class? “No, thank you. If you’ll excuse us, we have a class to be attending.” And she, with an expression positively daring anyone to argue with her, chivvied him out of the room and set about imparting her knowledge to her class.

No fewer than five people asked her why she didn’t try to pick up the hammer, after all, it wasn just a bit of harmless fun, right?

Natasha did not feel like answering them, and when everyone dispersed at her dismissal, a pall of gloom held over the gym. _ I’m sorry, _ she wanted to shout after them. _ I’m sorry and I shouldn’t have done what I did but I just can’t stand to- _

She tasted electricity and spun around. Thor stood behind her, that blasted hammer of justice dangling from one hand. “Widow?”

“It’s Natasha. Call me Natasha.” She was exhausted, both from giving demonstrations of some more difficult moves and from the flood of memories that had surged, threatening to overwhelm her at the thought of letting the hammer deem her unworthy. Despite her exhaustion, though, she dredged up a smile for him. Best not to alienate her teammates.

“Natasha. I wished to apologize to you for the difficult position I put you in before your class. It was unfair of me to put you on the spot like that.” Thor shifted the hammer from hand to hand, looking down.

He looked like a kicked puppy, so she figured she’d probably better say something nice. Oh, dear God.

Natasha chuckled at that, because he was, indeed, a god. 

“It’s all right. You couldn’t have known how I’d react. And it was out of line.” Noticing that he was looking somehow even more chastened, she hastened to clarify. “My reaction. Was out of line. I shouldn’t have done what I did.”

Thor beamed down at her, the sudden and complete mood reversal taking her by surprise. “I am glad we cleared this up, my friend!”

She felt like a heel for wanting to get rid of him. “Hey, Thor? Do you want to stop by my place tomorrow for dinner? I’m going to invite Bruce, Clint, and Tony too.”

Judging by the crackling of electricity she felt as he gave his answer, he was thoroughly excited.

***

Tony had been unable to come, because Tony had been suddenly and unexpectedly thrust onto a Stark Industries plane and flown to Tokyo, courtesy of Pepper. 

Pepper needed Tony in Tokyo to handle a high-profile money laundering case featuring one of their top financial directors there, in the hopes that it could all go away quietly and not cause any major problems before the New York Stock Exchange opened up again.

Tony didn’t want to be in Tokyo, hated being stuck in meetings with various apologetic aides, and told Natasha over the phone in no uncertain terms that he fully expected another team dinner to be scheduled upon his return so he could attend.

Clint was unconscious in a SHIELD facility, having had a mission go unexpectedly south in Georgia. The country, not the state.

Natasha felt bad for only finding that out five hours after he was brought in, and resolved to visit him the next day.

With that being sorted, and the knowledge that the only two people attending her impromptu dinner party were the two Avengers she didn’t know very well and trusted even less, Natasha threw herself into cooking.

Three hours later, surveying the complete mess that her kitchen had become, Natasha reflected on the idea that it was very possible that she cooked when she was stressed. She’d made a lot of food.

Like, a lot.

Oh well, Thor had a pretty big appetite. And what he didn’t eat, Clint certainly would the second he woke up. Okay, she could do this. These people, who were going to be arriving in about fifteen minutes, were her team. Fury wouldn’t have put them on the Avengers Initiative if they weren’t trustworthy.

_ One of them’s almost killed you before _ , her brain reminded her,  _ and the other one can fling lightning. Radiation-fuelled monster and a literal god. _

Shut up, she told her brain firmly, carrying the dish of pelmeni over to the table and fidgeting with the place settings.

_ You’re human,  _ her brain said.  _ Look at you, so breakable. _

Not that breakable, she thought irately at herself. You’ve had training. You’ve had that weird, crappy type of super soldier serum. You can handle the Hulk and a god.

There was a soft knock on her door, and she placed the plates of latkes on the table before rushing to get it. It was Bruce, soft half-smile firmly in place and glasses perched on top of his head. One of his shoes was untied. Natasha stood aside to let him in, internally breathing a sigh of relief. How had she ever thought this man was dangerous?

Then Thor appeared, bearing a container of Asgardian mead, and Natasha was pretty sure that the whole dinner thing went well.

***

Of course, she didn’t remember much of it, because she woke up in the bathtub with a newly-discharged-from-the-hospital Clint poking at her with a loofah. “I thought you didn’t get drunk,” he said, directly into her ear, and she winced.

“Aspirin?”

He handed her one, then resumed his poking. 

“Water?”

He pointed with the loofah at the other end of the bathtub, where the spigot was.

Ten minutes later, Natasha had had aspirin and was feeling somewhat more alive. She was sitting at her kitchen table as Clint moved around the room, brewing coffee and frying bacon. “So,” he said, after she’d downed her first cup of coffee. “What did you do?”

“We had dinner. Me and Bruce and Thor.”

“That totally does not explain why Thor is in your bed.” Clint paused, took in what he’d just said. “Tasha, did you-”

“No!”

“Are you-”

“Yes, I’m sure!” She snatched a freshly cooked piece of bacon off of the plate he was holding and munched on it. “It was just… bonding time.”

He fixed her with an incredulous stare. “Bonding time?”

“With the rest of the team.” She made grabby hands at the mug of coffee he was pouring, until he relented and handed it to her. She sipped at it eagerly.

Clint wasn’t done interrogating her. “You invited new people into your apartment. You got drunk with them here, and you passed out before they left.” He pointed a piece of bacon at her nose accusingly. She took a bite of it.

Well, when he put it like that, she could see why he was surprised. She didn’t tend to trust people that much. She shrugged at him and held out her coffee mug for a refill. “I’m not suddenly un-traumatized or anything.”

“But you’re doing better,” he said, his face softening. “God, Tasha, I’m so freaking proud of you!”

Her voice was smaller than she would have liked when she replied. “Really?”

“Really,” he said, and smiled at her. Then, as a very loud snore from Thor broke the silence, “Dammit, we were having a moment!”

Natasha laughed.

***

The next day, she went to visit Bruce in his lab, and found him doing some sort of experiment that seemed to involve trying to break the laws of physics. She stood in the doorway for a minute, then padded softly over to a lab stool and sat down.

Bruce looked up at her. “Hello, Natasha.”

“What are you working on?” He was holding what looked like a curved metal rod, and was poking a mass of purple slime in a test tube with it.

“Well, this right here,” he indicated the rod, “is sending frequencies of a certain vibration to these bits of algae, which have been infused with some of Tony’s nanotechnology.”

She settled herself in and prepared to watch him work. “Okay, and why is it doing that?”

“Well, the algae has properties that make it resistant to radiation, so we’re hoping that by training the nanobots spliced into it to respond to certain stimuli, we can create a moveable shield to contain explosions and other radioactive things.” Bruce kept poking at the purple mass for a minute, then moved over to his keyboard and typed in some rapid-fire commands.

The slime, which she could see had little metallic bits in it, slithered up over the side of the test tube, then formed a bubble capping of the end of it.

Bruce poked it with a pencil.

It didn’t move, despite its gel-like appearance.

“There,” he said. “Completely impenetrable.”

Natasha nodded, impressed. That certainly would have come in handy a few times on her missions. “What do you do next?”

“I make a whole lot more of it, and test it on a larger scale.”

***

Two days after that, she discovered what testing it on a larger scale meant. “I’m sorry, you need me to leave the lab because you’re going to detonate an atomic bomb?”

“Only a very small one. Tiny, really. If it fails, it won’t even compromise the structure of the building, because this particular lab is isolated underground.” Bruce had a pencil tucked behind his ear and his lab coat was crooked. She wondered if he’d rested at all since she’d visited him last.

“That is such a relief, to know that the building will be fine.” She barely resisted rolling her eyes. “It’s you I’m worried about.”

He paused in his tinkering. “What?”

“It’s you I’m worried about!”

“Don’t worry. It won’t kill me.” He sounded sad, suddenly.

“How do you know?”

“I’ve been bombed before, it barely burned the other guy’s skin.” He wasn’t meeting her eyes, now, even as he kept talking. “I’m not sure if there’s anything out there that can kill me.”

Well, okay. She could accept that answer, as long as he was sure he was going to be fine. “Does Tony even know you’ve got a tiny atomic bomb down here?”

He gave her a strange look. “Tony built it for me. Now, I really do have to ask you to leave. I don’t want you getting hurt.”

She left, vowing to return shortly and see how the experiment played out. In the meantime, she thought, she could get a workout done in the gym.

Thor was in the gym.

“Lady Natasha,” he boomed as she walked in the door. “It is an honor to see you today!”

“Hey, Thor,” she said, trotting over to her favorite machine and setting down her water bottle. Then she had an idea. “Do you want to spar?”

He moved closer to her, eyeing the ring she was clambering into. “Are you certain?”

“Yes, come on. I need to get a feel for your fighting style, anyway.” She wrapped her hands and started doing a few light stretches. She hoped he’d join her, she really did need to learn how he fought. It would make having his back in a battle a lot easier if she was better able to predict his moves.

“All right,” he conceded, dubiously. “I will endeavor not to hurt you.”

“Oh, I’m tougher than I look,” she said, bouncing on the balls of her feet and waiting eagerly for the first swing.


	4. Steve Rogers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Captain America joins the ranks

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i dont know what im doing here im sorry

When Steve Rogers moved into the tower, the entire mood shifted. The tension between him and Tony was a constant, building as time passed. On the seventh day, Tony snapped and slapped Rogers across the face.

Natasha saw it happen as she walked into the communal living area, and was across the room in a flash. Rogers was about to retaliate, fist formed and hand drawn back to deliver a blow to Tony, when Natasha intervened. She grabbed his arm as it swung forward, and used his own momentum to swing him around and topple him onto a couch. She crouched on his back, twisting one arm up behind his shoulder blade. 

“Tony,” she said gently, “are you all right?”

Tony sounded shaken when he responded. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m good. Think I broke my hand on his stupid face, though.”

From underneath her, Rogers made several muffled and indignant noises, until she twisted his arm harder. “Shut up. Tony, do you want me to throw him out?” She would, too, in an instant. Tony was one of her friends, and nobody attacked her friends.

“Nah,” Tony said, obviously trying to brush off the whole thing. His casual tone was belied by the tremor in his voice, although Natasha was kind enough not to mention it. “Just send him back to his floor?”

So she frog-marched a struggling Captain America across the room and tossed him into the elevator. “JARVIS, take him to his floor. And don’t let him leave it until Tony says he can.” Then, dusting her hands off as the elevator doors closed on Rogers’ enraged face, she hurried back over to Tony.

“Are you okay?” She asked, as she guided him to sit on one of the couches. He looked shaken.

“Yeah. It’s stupid anyway,” he said. “He was just saying I didn’t measure up to Howard.” He looked down at his hands, clenched into fists in his lap.

In Natasha’s personal opinion, that was going too far, and she barely restrained herself from going to find Rogers and throwing him out the window. Natasha had seen Tony’s file, and she’d seen his medical record when he was a kid. Howard Stark may have looked like the perfect father on paper, but the real story was much more grim. When he wasn’t ignoring Tony completely, he was slapping him around in a drunken rage. Tony’s arm had been broken twice by him before he was ten years old.

“That’s not true, Tony.” She said. “You’re ten times the man Howard ever was. Rogers just can’t see it yet.”

***

The next day, she kicked Rogers’ ass thoroughly while sparring, enjoying herself immensely. “That’s for Tony,” she huffed, as she landed a roundhouse kick neatly on his jaw.

“Whoa,” he said, from his new position flat on his back with her arm over his throat. “You’re fast. Why are you kicking me for Tony?”

“You look at him and you see your lost friend. I get that. But Tony isn’t Howard, and you need to learn to see him as his own person,” she hissed in his ear, surreptitiously kneeing him in the groin and delighting in his groan of pain. “You can’t even tell how much you’re hurting him.”

Then she stood up and walked away, dusting her hands off, leaving Captain America sprawled across the mat staring after her and rubbing his neck.

***

It took three days for Rogers to show up at her door, ducking his head and flushing red. “Hi, Natasha,” he said as she leaned against the doorframe and fixed him with a glare. “Can I come in?”

“No. Talk.” She wasn’t about to let this man she didn’t trust into her space, but she did rather hope he gave her the opportunity to beat the crap out of him again.

“Okay, uh. I thought about what you said, and I wanted to ask if, uh, if you could help me figure out how to apologize to Tony?” He shuffled his feet. “I got my head screwed on straight and figured it was time I accepted that I can’t go back in time.”

She eyed him suspiciously. “Well, okay. But if he punches you again you probably deserved it.”

A rush of happiness broke over his face and he grinned at her, unleashing the full force of that all-American smile. “Thanks!”

“Yeah, yeah,” she grumbled. “Get in here.”

***

Nearly a month later, Steve and Tony could at last coexist in the same room for some period of time, as long as there was a neutral teammate in there with them supervising, which Natasha counted as a win.

Then she walked in on them arguing politics.

Rogers was standing firm and unyielding, cold blue eyes narrowed, while Tony was up on his tiptoes, the picture of rage, yelling something about public image, and before she could really think her plan through at all, she found herself swooping in and snagging Rogers by the collar.

It was a good plan: get Rogers out of the Tower so Tony could cool himself down, and maybe give him a bit of a lecture while she was at it.

Surprisingly, he moved when she yanked on him, and she could almost see him drawing that gentlemanly charm around him like a mantle. She scoffed. “We’re going to the mall, and I’m introducing you to this century properly,” she informed him, before maneuvering him into the elevator and giving a jaunty wave to Tony before the doors closed.

It was midmorning, so public transport was noisy and crowded, but he handled it like a true Brooklynite. Natasha kept having to look over her shoulder, paranoia from a lifetime of spying, and she noticed the same twitchiness in her companion. He remained quiet, though, until she led him off the subway and up into a mall, where she beelined for a movie theater.

He followed her, docile, as she paid for their tickets and popcorn. He reached into his pocket for his wallet, but she waved him away and he, probably afraid to argue with her, went along with it.

Then she led him into the theater and sat them both down in the very middle, at the perfect vantage point, and settled back to wait for the previews to end, munching on popcorn.

“Uh,” he said, and she shoved his bucket of popcorn at him in answer.

“This is 3D,” she told him, excited. “You’re gonna love it, I know I did. Put these glasses on.”

“You know you did? You mean you haven’t always known about it?”

Well, crap. That had been a slip of the tongue. Still. The man was technically her ally, part of her team, and she needed to trust him. It wasn’t like the answer wasn’t in her file for anyone who cared to hack it, either. “I’ve been around longer than I look.”

He turned in his seat, a creaky movement that had an eldery lady in the row in front of them making a disgruntled shushing noise. “Sorry, ma’am,” he whispered, before turning back to Natasha expectantly.

She sighed. May as well. Tony already knew, and she was sure Clint did too. “You know I was a student of the Red Room. They gave me something to make me stronger, tougher, make me live longer. And I spent time between missions in cryofreeze.” Talking about it made her recall the bone deep chill sinking into her bones, and she shuddered.

Steve draped his light jacket over her shoulders, swamping her in warm fabric, and she grumbled a thank you before settling back to watch the movie that was starting.

***

Some days, Natasha just couldn’t handle being inside. It felt like the walls were closing in around her, like she was trapped in an endless warren of hallways. Those days were fewer and farther between than they ever had been before, but when she escaped the building she didn’t like to venture out into New York’s crowded streets.

There was just too much uncertainty. 

One wrong word or movement from a passerby and her already panicked brain could think she was under attack, and that just wasn’t good for public image. Or, for that matter, for her, because she really didn’t hurt innocent people anymore; she didn’t need any more red in her ledger. And it definitely wasn’t good for the hapless person who set her off.

No, on those days she would gather up her yoga mat and retreat to the roof of Avengers Tower, where she’d spend some time relaxing both her mind and body.

She knew as soon as she woke up that it was one of those days. Opening one eye and grumbling about stupid PTSD interfering with her plans, she trudged into her kitchen and located a cup of yogurt, which she atw with her blanket wrapped around her shoulders like a cape.

Then she changed her clothes, tied her hair back, grabbed her yoga mat, and headed for the elevator.

In all the time she’d been going up to the roof, she’d never encountered anyone else up there, which was why it came as a shock to her when she stepped out of the elevator, still grumbling, and was faced with Steve Rogers’ back.

He was sitting cross legged, facing away from her, bent over a large sketchpad and working industriously. She took a cautious, noisy step forward to announce her presence, and he turned to smile at her.

Okay, so he wasn’t in a murdery mood like she was.

She inched closer and he waved her over, so she went to peer at the drawing.

It was graphite, it seemed. It showed the skyline as it looked to her that day across the top half of the paper, then, mirrored below that, the skyline as she imagined it had looked before… well, everything. Before he joined the army, before he got the serum, before he got frozen in a block of ice.

She reflected that he’d certainly faced a lot of difficulties in his own life, and maybe she should talk to him about it sometime. It helped, she’d found, to share similar experiences.

“That’s lovely,” she said genuinely, surprising herself.

He flushed red to the roots of his blond hair, and ducked his head awkwardly. “Uh, thanks.”

Plopping down beside him and looking out across New York, she closed her eyes and inhaled deeply, relishing the feeling of the wind in her hair. “I was going to do some yoga. You wanna join?”

He looked at her, thinking.

“I do it when I’m having a bad day,” she explained. “It helps.”

“Yeah,” he said, slowly. “Yeah, I think I’d like that.”

***

Later that day, they found themselves fighting a horde of giant mutant frogs in Queens, and honestly, what the  _ hell. _

Natasha dodged a long, sticky tongue as she surveyed the twenty foot tall amphibians, waiting to see what effect Clint’s stun arrows would have on it.

The arrow hit it in the shoulder, and it did not appear to be stunned. It appeared to be angry.

“Go for the eyes!” Tony yelled, repulsors blasting away at another one - how many of them were there? - and she pulled out her handgun, readying herself for the unpleasant experience of climbing a giant, angry frog.

“Here,” Steve shouted to her, followed by a vaguely complicated series of gestures. He was saying something else, but she couldn’t hear him over the noise of a newspaper stand being crushed underneath a large, webbed foot.

It looked like he wanted her to run toward him and jump off of the shield so he could launch her upward to shoot the frog in the eyes, which was a vast improvement of trying to scale the thing.

Did she trust him to follow through and do his part? They had never practiced a move like that.

A woman screamed as the tongue shot out and latched onto her ankle, and Natasha made her decision. She nodded to Steve, backing up and crouching down for a run.

Then she was flying, his shove propelling her to eye level with the frog. She shot it twice, once in each eye, before dropping and being caught by Steve, who didn’t look overexerted at all.

Then the dead frog was falling toward both of them, and they had to run. Still, they had a method that worked, and employed it mostly successfully for the rest of the battle.

***

The next morning, there was a package with her name on it in the hallway leading to the elevator, right outside her door, and she eyed it with great suspicion. It was long, and cylindrical, rather like a tube.

She poked it with her slipper.

Nothing happened, no explosions, so she dragged it inside and thumped it lightly.

Then she pried the corner of it open. There was a rolled up paper inside, and she delicately slid it out, having decided that it probably wasn’t a trap.

It was a picture of her.

It was done in graphite, but done so well it looked almost like it was breathing, and there was a faint tinge of deep red in the hair.

It showed her head and shoulders. Her shoulders were angled away from the viewer, and she was looking back with about three quarters of her face showing. Her hair flowed loose around her shoulders, and her eyes were steely and determined.

What shocked her the most was her expression. There was a hint of a smile curling around her lips, and, when she looked closer, a spark of liveliness in her eyes. Like she’d just told a joke and was waiting, satisfied, for the reaction. 

She didn’t look like a spy, or an assassin. She looked like a regular, happy woman.

She found herself tearing up, and scrubbed one shirtsleeve across her eyes. Then her gaze slid down to the bottom corner of the picture and… yes. A tiny SR. Steve had seen her, seen past her shields, and had drawn her the way she hardly ever managed to be.

She decided she was going to have to bake him something good as a thank you.

***

She was knocking on his door, plate of blini in tow, when he poked his head out.

His hair stood up in a fuzzy halo around his head, and there was a pillow crease down his cheek. He looked extraordinarily vulnerable and human, despite being genetically enhanced and a whole lot bigger than her.

“I brought you something. As a thank you,” she blurted out, and Jesus, why was she so nervous? “It’s blini. Uh, Russian pancake, kind of. And blackberry preserves.”

So maybe she’d discovered a pick-your-own blackberry and blueberry farm outside the city, and had gone absolutely wild, returning with multiple gallons of each kind, and resorted to learning how to can them? She could do that if she wanted.

He smiled, a genuine smile, and thanked her softly before stepping aside, inviting her in. She grinned back and stepped forward when the elevator door down the hall opened, Tony sprinting out.

He was panting, in a hurry, and obviously close to panic. “Nat! Steve!” he yelped, rushing down the hall toward them. “You gotta come, please hurry, there’s a Winter Soldier in my lobby scaring off investors.”

***

Fully armed and wary, all the Avengers living in the Tower at the time edged out into the lobby, which was mostly empty and - Natasha squinted - surrounded by SHIELD personnel on the outside.

There was a man dressed in all black, with a silver arm and long hair, sitting quietly in a chair. There were bruises all over his face, and he was carrying himself like he had a broken rib.

Natasha felt a multitude of repressed Red Room memories rush over her, and she blanched even as she heard the clang of Steve’s shield falling to the floor.

Steve took a couple of steps forward, trying his level best to look non threatening. He looked like he’d seen a ghost.

Hell, maybe he had. She knew she was, currently.

“Buck?” Steve whispered, the words forced out through a raw throat.

The man looked up, revealing a split lip and bloodied, bruised neck. “Heya, Stevie.”


	5. Bucky Barnes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bucky comes back and, over time, begins to heal

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have a tumblr now! Come see me at nebulous-bondage!
> 
> Also can you tell how much I love Bucky

Then Nick Fury was there, pushing through the crowd and barking out orders. “Soldier, you’re coming with me. I’ve got a fully trained team, and you’re not gonna give us any trouble. Team, get back upstairs.” They turned to obey, Natasha’s head spinning, when he added on “Widow, you’re coming too.”

She sat in a bland, sterile SHIELD lab, the Winter Soldier (Bucky?) restrained next to her. Vibranium cuffs. He pulled at them occasionally, making them clink, and she always jumped at the sound. Technicians scurried around them, monitoring and recording things, and Coulson talked quietly with a team of scientists. 

It all felt horribly familiar. 

“Natasha,” one of the scientists said, smiling broadly. “Thanks to what you’ve told us about the Red Room and Hydra’s psychological manipulations, we think we’ll be able to completely undo the programming Mr. Barnes underwent with them, making sure he’s not a danger to anyone.”

He faltered, looking over at Barnes, who seemed rather menacing and very much a danger at the time. “The thing is, we need to know what his trigger words are. Did they use standard ones for all the operatives? Will what we did for you work on him?”

Natasha shook her head and cleared her throat, speaking hoarsely. “N-no. All the Widows had the same training. His was different.”

The scientist made a humming noise and wrapped a blood pressure cuff around Barnes’s flesh arm. “Okay then. Thank you for your help, I think that’s all we needed. We'll do our best.”

Natasha swung her feet, thinking, then blurted out “I know his words.”

“You do?” Coulson asked, moving closer. 

“Y-yeah. They used them a lot. When they had him… train us.”

“He trained all of you?”

“Yes. He was… they encouraged the formation of a bond between each of us and him. They thought it would make us more efficient, more likely to carry out joint missions, if we cared about the other’s safety.” She looked down, remembering blue eyes and a metal hand from when she was young, biting snow and the focus of a mission when she was older. 

Coulson looked suddenly quite constipated. “Oh,” he said delicately. “A… bond? Did they… force…” he trailed off, completely unsure of where to go from there. 

Beside her, Barnes recoiled, obviously visibly disgusted by the suggestion. 

“No,” Natasha exclaimed. “No, nothing like that. It was… they would have him do that with other women, regular women, and then when the children were born, the Red Room would come for them. They thought the serum would carry over, but it didn’t, and we all ended up with their version of it instead. He’s my father.”

There was complete silence. 

***

Bucky moved into the tower two weeks later, skittish and confused but completely, wholly Bucky Barnes again. 

The first thing he did was visit Natasha. 

“I’m sorry,” he said to her brokenly as he sipped at the tea she’d made. “For everything.”

“You have nothing to be sorry for,” she told him. “They controlled you.”

“Still,” he replied. “I put you through hell.”

“They put me through hell,” she insisted forcefully. “They put both of us, Bucky, you have to understand. This wasn’t your fault.”

He slumped at her table, so far from the man she’d known. The man who’d trained her. That man had been subdued and recalcitrant, and with good reason, but there had been a spark of rebellion in him. He’d gone easy on them, when he could get away with it. He’d brought them little gifts, presents of the outside world, when he could manage it. He’d taken a punishment for Anya, once. 

He’d run his fingers through her fiery hair and called her his little spider, and promised to take her far, far away from the Red Room someday. 

“It’s okay,” she said again, gently this time, as she vowed to help him regain that spark of life. 

***

She taught him all about the twenty-first century for the next couple of weeks, holed up in one of their apartments or the other as he asked questions, absorbing information like a sponge. 

She also got him to talk to the same SHIELD psychologist she’d had, and he was starting on the long road to recovery. Sure, he flinched at the slightest chill, but he absolutely never lashed out violently. There was none of the Soldier left in him. 

So, one day she asked him if he’d be okay with sitting in the team’s common area for a bit and maybe meeting some people. After a little bit of coaxing, he agreed, and they made their way down. 

She tucked her favorite blanket around his shoulders and retrieved some food for both of them, and they sat and chatted quietly for a bit. He seemed to be doing well. 

Then there was a loud crash from the doorway and he jumped, burrowing under the blanket and whimpering in fear at the noise. 

Natasha turned around and saw Steve standing there gaping, with a book on the floor in front of him. He’d dropped it. 

“Bucky,” he whispered, looking at the Bucky-shaped lump of blanket. 

“Steve?” The blanket asked. Then Bucky’s head popped back out of it, and their eyes met. 

Natasha, cynic though she was, swore she heard romantic music. 

“Bucky,” Steve breathed, hearts dancing in his eyes. 

Then Bucky was hurling himself over the back of the couch into Steve’s arms, babbling wildly, and Steve was reciprocating just as much while Natasha looked on, and then… then they went silent. 

She blinked. They seemed to be attached at the lips. 

That explained a lot, actually. 

***

Together, she and Steve helped Bucky integrate into society, and he quickly proved to enjoy yoga and watercolor. He and Natasha did yoga together, and then she’d sit and chat with him and Steve while they worked on their art, leaving when they got too wrapped up in each other. 

The day Bucky was cleared by SHIELD to leave the Tower (and, coincidentally, rejoin the team if he so chose) was a day they celebrated thoroughly.

“So,” she said, leaning in to where Bucky was scrambling eggs with his hair pulled back in a neat bun. “You’re free. Where do you wanna go?”

“I wanna go to the park,” he declared, metal arm making an alarming noise as he shifted the pan. “And sit outside, and feed the ducks.”

She smiled. “That sounds like a wonderful plan.”

The three of them found a secluded space in the park, and started tossing goodies (not bread, because bread wasn’t good for them, Bucky said) to the inquisitive flock of ducks that quickly surrounded them. 

Steve was sketching peacefully, leaving Bucky to deal with the ducks that had decided to follow him around everywhere, and Natasha was stretched out on the grass, luxuriating in the sun. 

It was a good day. 

***

The metal arm kept making the noise, so Natasha eventually persuaded Bucky to go talk to Tony about it. 

She stopped him right as they reached the lab door. “If he gets to be too much, it’s okay, he’ll back off if you ask, okay? It’ll be all right.”

Bucky nodded once, jaw clenched. “Yeah.”

She pushed open the door, leading him in. Tony was expecting them, and had a couple of chairs and a workspace set up already. “Hey!” He greeted excitedly, shoving the wrench in his hand into one pocket and patting one of the bots on the head before walking over to them. 

“Hey, Tony,” she said as she settled into the stool she assumed was meant for her. 

“Right,” Tony muttered as he rushed around. “Bucky bear, you’re in the chair, and I think that’s everything. Have a seat?”

Gingerly, Bucky took a seat. His eyes were squeezed closed and every muscle was tensed. 

Natasha laid a hand gently on his flesh arm. “Hey. You okay?”

“Mm.”

“Come on, answer me. Please?”

Bucky pried his eyes open with what looked like a great effort. “I just- it’s been so long without pain. I’m not looking forward to it.”

Dumbstruck, Natasha blinked at him. He thought this was going to hurt him, and he’d done it anyway? “Tony, does fixing the arm cause pain?”

“No. It won’t. And I’ll take some quick stats so I can make him a better one soon.” Tony was looking uncharacteristically serious. 

“Bucky,” she said. “Hey, can you look at me? It’s not gonna hurt, I promise.”

He nodded slowly, obviously not trusting her, but extended the arm to Tony anyway. 

With his other hand, he gripped her fingers tight, and she tried her damndest to be a rock he could rely on. 

***

One day, she and the rest of the team were called upon to do some PR work after the distraction of most of the Bronx by aliens, and so she found herself surrounded by her teammates working at an animal shelter. 

Apparently, being staffed by superheroes made people want to visit the place, and when people visited, they sometimes left with pets. 

Natasha was in the back, taking care of some puppies that had been dropped off, because most of the general population was scared of her. They left Tony and Steve to handle the public. 

Clint was outside in the dog run, perched on top of the fence, when she went to enlist his help in moving a pallet of dog food bags. 

She made her way over to him, noting that she could see a lot of outside cages in need of attention. “Bucky!” She yelled, hoping he’d hear her. 

A faint “What,” floated around from the corner of the building. 

“Can you handle outside cages?”

“Sure!”

An hour later, once the puppies were asleep and the sick one seemed to be doing a little bit better, she went to go check on him. 

About half of the outside cages had been nicely cleaned, and there was a bundle of Bucky sitting in one partway down the row. 

Natasha’s immediate thought was that he’d had a flashback and somehow injured himself, and she sprinted down to the enclosure’s door, cursing her stupidity. She should’ve known not to put the ex-POW in a small caged area, she wasn’t an idiot. 

Then she reached Bucky, and saw that he was smiling and cooing at a brown dog of indeterminate breed, which was resting on his lap. 

Judging by the tag on the door, the dog was female, four years old, part Lab, and named Rosie. 

“Hey,” she said cautiously, and Rosie hopped up to greet her. As the dog unfolded, she could see that one of Rosie’s front legs was missing. 

She looked at Rosie. 

She looked at Bucky, who was exuding hopefulness. 

She looked back at Rosie, who was wagging her tail happily. 

“Okay, I guess we’re getting a dog.”

Rosie’s paperwork was done quickly, and Bucky and Natasha immediately visited the nearest pet store and went completely overboard on getting her the best of everything, returning to the Tower that night exhausted and burdened with many bags, with a happy pup tottering along between them. 


End file.
